MoviePass 2.0 owner (and original co-founder) Stacy Spikes is feeling as overwhelmed as his servers were on Thursday morning.<\/p>\n
The new MoviePass waitlist opened yesterday at 9 am By 9:05, 30,000 people signed up, crashing the website for nearly three hours. By 9 am this morning, the reconnected waitlist had 463,000 signups. \u201cHoly moly!\u201d is how Spikes put it to IndieWire.<\/p>\n
Spikes estimated perhaps 50,000 or 100,000 Day-1 signups, so he isn’t sweating the server meltdown. \u201cIt’s a good problem to have,\u201d he said of the mad rush. \u201cWe are drinking from the firehose.\u201d<\/p>\n
The waitlist is open until Monday. A week later, an indeterminate number of those who signed up will be converted to actual users of MoviePass 2.0 (as Spikes is calling his vision’s resurrection). Spikes said he has \u201cno idea\u201d how many people that will be \u2014 not while his head is still spinning from demand \u2014 but he’s vowed to slow-play MoviePass this time. The 2.0 plan, as he put it, is to \u201copen certain markets, test out the new system, make sure we’ve got happy people \u2014 then continue to open it wider and wider.\u201d<\/p>\n Speed \u200b\u200bsank MoviePass 1.0. Founded in 2011, Spikes sold a majority stake of MoviePass to Helios and Matheson (HMNY) in 2017, which then fired Spikes in 2018. The next year, MoviePass shut down; it filed for bankruptcy in 2020. Spikes, who reacquired the company last November, vows to not repeat the sins of the past. (He’s also quick to point out they weren’t feeling<\/em> sin.)<\/p>\n The biggest issue for MoviePass 1.0 was its clearly unsustainable price point. When HMNY installed a $9.95-per-month unlimited plan, it seemed too good to be true \u2014 or at least, to make money. Turned out, it was \u2014 and it couldn’t. \u201cThere’s no way that a $10 price point would work on any planet,\u201d Spikes said. \u201cThat was part of why they fired me and forced me out of the company because I kept saying, ‘This can’t work.’\u201d<\/p>\n In Spikes’ estimation, for the unlimited plan to scale, the cash loss from MoviePass subscriptions would climb into the billions. it wasn’t the only mistake; there were also the blackout dates that removed certain theaters and movies.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy would you make enemies of your theater partners and your customers? That makes no sense,\u201d Spikes said. \u201cI had been fired and was sitting at home going, ‘This is so bad.’\u201d<\/p>\nRelated<\/h3>\n<\/section>\n
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